Listserve Comments

I chose to subscribe to WWWEDU--The World Wide Web in Education

List--listproc@ready.cpb.org for both personal and professional reasons.

As I told you back in July, when I signed up for IDS 599,I want to use

my home computer's internet for more that just e-mailing messages to my

sisters, niece, nephew, cousins, and friends. Professionally, I am

using my increasing skil and knowledge on the internet as a project in

EDF 698-699. After my initial problems with subscribing, I received

subscriptions from several listserves but I chose this one to continue

with. Incidentally, during this three week subscription, a friend of

mine upgraded the memory on my computer, upgraded Windows 3.1 to Windows

95, and upgraded Netscape 3.0 to 4.0. I thought that we had lost all my

past e-mail but I found it by MYSELF!!!!

I was amazed at how far-flung the entries to this listserve were. In

addition to Alabama, Ohio, New York, North Carolina, Massachusetts,

Vermont, and Florida, I received articles from the University of

Brasilia in Brazil and Capetown, South Africa. Most of the subscribers

were educators either asking for help using the internet in classrooms

or other educators answering those requests for assistance. There were

two contributors who were not specifically teachers. They both had very

useful ideas to share. One was a parent who sent in a message about her

volunteer work in her daughter's second grade. She stated, "I have been

volunteering my strong technology and training background to help and

guide my daughter's school teacher in Technology Elementary

Curriculum." She was thrilled to hear that her daughter's teacher will

now help others to use the internet and suggested that other teachers do

the same. If only I could be fortunate enough to have this type of help

after I ask for parent volunteers!! (I have had a grandfather of one of

my students offer us a used printer.) I was able to use some

interesting ideas for activities about St. Patrick's Day from one

contributor who is a day care provider.

Several of the teachers requested courses for ideas to put their

internet to greater use in their classrooms. There were quite a few

responses to this, including athe World Conference of the WWW, Internet

& Intranet in Orlando, Florida in November of 1998. Some educators

wanted partners for themselves or their students to correspond with.

Two educators, one from Ohio and one from New York, offered help to

another "Technology Curriculum Integration Specialist" about developing

a job description for the position. Another educator wanted some ideas

about the feasibility of portable computer labs. I'm not sure what that

means and I didn't ever view any answers to thie request. In answer to

a request for ideas for use of the internet in a low-tech situation, a

teacher from Massachusets suggested using hypertext and "hilites" list.

This type of collaboration would require quite a bit of preparation

according this quote, "Good luck! There's much good work to be done.

In fact, when you think about it, such collaborative projects can be

done without any technology. But being able to publish web pages makes

the assignments much more worldly for the students: when they know it's

going global, when they know they have a potentially global audience

rather than just that of their teachers, they might invest more energy

in the produciton." The contributor from Brazil was also developing a

new project, "I am involved in producing a project in this line which

will be the core of a Science and Technology virtual museum in Brasilia,

Brazil. The main public will be the children from the public

educational system. In Brazil, it means they come from very low income

families." These types of projects would be very interesting to see how

they eventually turn out--only time will tell. I read with interest the

e-mail letter from the educator who had taught in Capetown, South

Africa. After reading about "Project Capetown" in IDS 599, I wondered

whether this was related. He described his school as a private boys

high school of 510 pupils. Then his position became even more curious

to me, "Someone else does the network engineering and administration and

the user support across the campus. I have rights to perform network

administrator functions in case pupils forget passwords or some account

needs to be disabled. I am able to focus entirely on finding and

managing appropriate inter-disciplinary projects for my 8th and 9th

grade pupils, whom I see 3 times in a seven day cycle. During these

projects I act as a facilitator and ensure that enquiry learning takes

place in a collaborative environment."

I have not unsubscribed to this listserve because I am curious about

several of these contributions. Whether I ever find out about the

outcomes of any of these requests or programs, this has been an

enlighening experience. I had no idea that this type of resource was

available until you introduced it to us. Eventhough it was VERY

AGGRAVATING to subscribe, I'm glad that I persisted because, like the

posting of our IDS 599 projects in December, I learned that when one is

using the internet you have to follow directions very carefully and keep

trying until you achieve your chosen destination. This has been very

helpful in completing my final project about my use of the internet for

EDF 698-699.